Marketing Principles at a Brewers Game
January, 2009
Dear Clients and Friends,
Last summer, I attended a major league baseball game in a large, well-attended stadium. It happened that my team was getting badly pummeled, so it gave me time to observe my surroundings. Starting about the fourth inning, a young, partially inebriated fan began the process of trying to start a wave around the stadium. He tried without success for two full innings. Finally, in the seventh inning, to his (and to my) amazement, he got the darn thing going. Since I had long lost interest in the game, I began to think about what principles of marketing and strategy were at play here. These are the lessons that I think could be learned from this “case study”:
- Know your target audience – The fan’s sales pitch of “C’mon, Let’s go! Get up!” with flailing arms was misguided and downright scary, given the nature of the audience, middle-aged parents with kids.
- Timing is everything – The drunken fan attempted his start-up yelp when the home team had the bases loaded or the count was 3 and 2 on the team’s best hitter, hardly primetime for concerted action.
- Know your competition – Wave-starting is hard when the jumbo scoreboard is showing funny clips of baseball bloopers or amazing plays of the week. People are attracted to catchy visuals, not annoying ones.
- Apply strong marketing power – Don’t enter a venture, even wave-starting, with weak marketing thrusts. The baseball drunk didn’t get the wave going until he enlisted the help of other drunks in his row.
- Add creativity – Even Steps #1-#4 above were not sufficient until the fan and his friends began to pretend that an invisible wave had already begun making its way around the stadium. They stood and pointed at it across the far side of the stadium, and then in unison tracked its progress around the stadium toward our section, pointing at its hypothetical approach giddily. Since people naturally are curious when others point at anything, this attracted the attention they needed, and “VOILA”, a wave was born.
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Next month, our letter will address the increasingly important issue of business retention. There have always been good reasons for insurers and asset managers to want to retain business – now, there are even more.
Tim Pfeifer
President |
